Clearly Now, the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Other Trips

by Eli Hastings

Overview

“A drug, romance, and adventure-filled exploration ... a story that is both thoroughly of its time and timeless in theme.” — Seattle Times

From ill-advised quests for narcotics to dramatic summer road trips, this memoir of a relationship with a self-destructive woman is “as elemental, lyrical, and cringe-inducing a love story as they come.” — Kirkus Reviews

Suspenseful, darkly funny, and devastating, this is Eli Hastings’s true story of his troubled, decades-long relationship with his friend Serala. At family events, Serala wore demure saris and ate delicately from plates of curry. But elsewhere, she wore a lip ring, designer shades, and a cowboy hat. She regularly drank frat boys under the table, slept fewer than five hours a week, and placed herself in a series of dangerous situations for another bag of heroin.

Serala’s complex personality and seemingly haphazard choices are brought to vivid life, from the search for drugs in Mexican border towns to unplanned 50-hour road trips across the continent. Although she died tragically at age 27, Hastings writes the story of her dark journey with hope and tenderness in this unique memoir of friendship and loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770410770
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	05/01/2013
Edition description:	No Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eli Hastings lives in Seattle, Washington. He is completing an internship and MA in family therapy. He is a poetry facilitator with youth at King County Juvenile Detention and holds an MFA from the UNC at Wilmington. His first book, Falling Room, was published in the American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press in 2006.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In electric, adventurous prose, Eli Hastings' Clearly Now, the Rain tells the story of loving one wrecked soul, and the rich, dark wonder of the joys to be found along the way."  —Paul Lisicky, author, Famous Builder and Lawnboy

"Eli Hastings will make you fall in love—and then he will punch through your ribcage and rip your heart out—and by the end of his moving memoir, Clearly Now, the Rain, you will thank him for it."  —Benjamin Percy, author, Refresh, Refresh and The Wilding

Editorial Reviews

Some relationships make us question whether we’ve loved enough, others whether we’ve loved too much. But Seattle author Eli Hastings grapples with an even more perplexing issue in his latest book: Did he love the right way? His new memoir, ‘Clearly Now, the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Other Trips,’ is a drug, romance and adventure-filled exploration of that gut-wrenching question, a story that is both thoroughly of its time (post-grunge Seattle) and timeless in theme.” — Seattle Times

“As elemental, lyrical, and cringe-inducing a love story as they come.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

A candid, bracing memoir of love, addiction and self-destruction. When readers first meet Hastings (Falling Room, 2006), in the middle of the 1990s, he comes across with a bit of posture: a hepcat, we are to understand, like Richard Fariña's Gnossos Pappadopoulis. But forgive him; he was fresh out of high school and about to be flayed by love and death. At college that autumn, he met Serala, a woman from the south of India, a rose with a full complement of thorns, a smoky romanticism and a whispery deepness that speaks of experiencing too much too soon in life. Hastings doles out her character as if skating backward, looking over his shoulder for the next patch of thin ice. There will be many, for Serala nursed and then fully blossomed into addiction and was seduced by suicide, which lurked even after her failed second attempt, when she realized that "we don't get any stronger, we just become better liars." Her story is as biting and claustrophobic as Nicolas Cage's in Leaving Las Vegas, but it is drawn with great affection. Hastings became both her friend and her lover, and he is brutally honest in his assessments of her flaws and of their relationship. He also relates the many other travails he experienced during these years, including the many adventures abroad and on road trips at home, as well as a slew of other fraught relationships--familial and romantic--as Serala moved, now like a shadow and now a devouring presence, in and out of his life. "She enabled years of pleasant fog for me, some of which I regret," he writes. As elemental, lyrical and cringe-inducing a love story as they come.

Kirkus Reviews